Artificial Intelligence

Perhaps one of the most complex pieces to the human puzzle is our sense
ofhumor. A sense of humor not only involves intelligence and comprehension
butalso an array of emotions. It is not enough to just understand
somethinghumorous, but it is also necessary that an emotional and
physiological responsebe able to occur for a person to have a sense of
humor. However, though there ismuch involved in ‘‘getting’’ a joke, there
are even more factorsinvolved in telling a joke (Ziv 27). This is,
unfortunately, an oversimplifiedexplanation of what a sense of humor
entails, as many people have their ownopinion about what a sense of humor
is. It is possible that we may be able tomeasure the level of humor a joke
has. It would seem that the greater thepositive reaction a joke can evoke
and the larger the amount of people iteffects, the funnier a joke is.
Conceivably then, it can be said that though itmay not be all too difficult
to create a joke, creating a really good jokerequires much more capability.
Now that there is some establishment of what asense of humor is, the next
question is, can a sense of humor be taught? To ahuman, perhaps it can be,
but whether a good sense of humor can be taught to acomputer is doubtful.
Where our technology lies today there is little chance ofcomputers
replicating true human emotion (Beale 45). As our world
simultaneouslyshrinks and expands through the growing abilities and
applications of computersin our everyday lives, it seems that the role of
the computer has been reversed.

Before we knew that the computer only
understood what we programmed it tounderstand; however, now the majority of
our society is learning more fromcomputers than they are able to input into
it. As stated, it only seems that theroles are being reversed, because
somewhere far down at the beginning of theline someone is programming the
computer. However, a transition is occurringamong computer programmers, as
they attempt to create machines that learn ratherthan machines that must be
programmed. It has become the hope of many engineersthat the "mechanisms of
human thought could be precisely modeled andsimulated on a computer". This
is known as Artificial Intelligence(Artificial 3). Artificial Intelligence,
or AI, since its conception, has grownfrom a dozen researchers, to thousands
of engineers and specialists; fromprograms capable of playing checkers, to
systems designed to diagnose disease (Dumm

4). With all that the computer
is learning now a new question arises: How longbefore a computer can learn
to understand and execute the attributes of a goodsense of humor? It is
believed that the theory of AI has existed long beforerecorded, but was not
made conceivable until the invention of the electroniccomputer in 1941
(Dreyfus 6). Since then many scientists and engineers have beenworking on a
way to make the computer more human. Once it was noticed that thecomputer
could perform simple tasks such as mathematical problems and memoryrecall
much faster than humans the idea began that they should become more likeus
(Beale 2). However after almost sixty years scientists have still not
beenable to create AI in the sense that they had hoped. Even the
Intelligence thatthey have given computers, which at the time was considered
a triumph inreaching towards AI, is no longer considered valid(Kurzweil
14-16). Thisincludes such "simple" machines as intelligent chess boards and
otherprograms for elementary games. In the mid 1960’’s, however, Marvin
Minskycreated and interactive computer program that many believed to be
Artificial

Intelligence. Though Minsky was even doubtful of his
achievement anotherscientist, Joseph Weizenbaum, quickly stepped forward
with an even strongerrepresentation of AI. This new program was called Eliza
and was able to imitatea nondirective therapist. This form of AI was
extremely believable to those whotested it, but Weizenbaum promptly
explained the simplicity of his program. Hethen pointed out the directions
and commands the program used to fakecomprehension (Dreyfuss 69-72).
Weizenbaum proved through his contest that bothhis and Minsky’s programs
were